Films like Mazes and Monsters have a very special audience, and it's basically the same sort of audience which now rallies round J. K. Rowling: abusive parents who don't understand why their children don't believe in the same things they do, and who therefore set themselves to make sure children don't have much choice. They'll stamp out the sickness one way or another, you can bet your life on that. If necessary they'll send for the help of that nice mild-spoken doctor with the sideline in breaking children's wills.

But before the extreme measures are taken there's gentler ways to bully the kids away from stuff that the parents (along with "everyone", in the Matt Walsh sense of the word) just know in their hearts is the devil's temptation.

(cont'd)

Protecting childhood—abstracted, idealized, unreal childhood—is the beating heart of the Christofascist gang and they have spent very many decades filling the press with carefully scrubbed and dechristianized parenting advice that boils down to "God told Abraham to kill his own son so basically, by just beating and maiming you for the rest of your life, it's like I'm being generous."

The worst abusers always channel God when they're doing it. And the very fact that these people MUST feel, in the instant and the moment of the crime, that some sort of irresistible power or faith is behind their actions gives the reasonable reader pause. Just what is God up to?

(cont'd)

Here I make another confession: Hassan of Serenity has been attempting by degrees to get me used to the feeling of extreme calm which prevails in her contemplation of Allah, and which I daresay any person can get a taste of (@KaylinEvergreen will know what I mean here) simply by visiting a mosque in respectful fashion. I have often found the sight of the circumambulating pilgrims at Makkah to be soothing: one sees something unusual there, which is the grand motion of mass of human beings who share the same sense of purpose.

Therefore the feelings of "God" and divine right which the Christofascists act upon seems exceptionally strange to me. There is no peace, no stillness in those folks.

(cont'd)

Their "faith" is a battle faith, they say, and thus even children get to be enemies and spies for evil in this system, only into Dungeons and Dragons (or whatever) because a demon has got hold of them. The "Christian parent" feels as if extreme measures, outlandishly extreme measures, are called for. There's an entire Christofascist industry based solely on providing just such measures, in a vast panoply of options, all administered with supreme deftness and circumlocution.

(cont'd)